Semisupervised learning for lensed quasar detection

ABSTRACT Lensed quasars are key to many areas of study in astronomy, offering a unique probe into the intermediate and far Universe. However, finding lensed quasars has proved difficult despite significant efforts from large collaborations. These challenges have limited catalogues of confirmed lensed quasars to the hundreds, despite theoretical predictions that they should be many times more numerous. We train machine learning classifiers to discover lensed quasar candidates. By using semisupervised learning techniques we leverage the large number of potential candidates as unlabelled training data alongside the small number of known objects, greatly improving model performance. We present our two most successful models: (1) a variational autoencoder trained on millions of quasars to reduce the dimensionality of images for input to a dense neural network classifier that can make accurate predictions and (2) a convolutional neural network trained on a mix of labelled and unlabelled data via virtual adversarial training. These models are both capable of producing high-quality candidates, as evidenced by our discovery of GRALJ140833.73+042229.98. The success of our classifier, which uses only multiband images, is particularly exciting as it can be combined with existing classifiers, which use other data than images, to improve the classifications of both models and discover more lensed quasars.